Year C,
Easter Vigil
March
31, 2013
The
Reverend Dr. Brent Was
“How blessed is this night, when earth and heaven are
joined and man is reconciled to God.”
Welcome to the mystery of Easter. It is totally fantastic, this story. The capture, torture and execution of a
messianic figure in a time and place rife with messianic figures, of a
backwater religious and political radical in a time of religious and political
radicalism… Somehow that action, that
horrible death ontologically, that means fundamentally, it ontologically changed
the fabric of existence, changed humanity’s relationship with God and
everything. It is fantastic.
Without a doubt, the fantastic is why
I am Christian. I am Anglican because I
think we remember it well, our rites and rituals are potent tolls for focusing
human attention and intention, for conjuring holy remembrance, but I am a
Christian for what we are
remembering.
What are we remembering?
The incarnation of our Lord. What
are we remembering? The revelation and
conduct of Jesus Christ’s earthly ministry: lifting up the lowly and casting
down the mighty, freeing the needy from needless suffering. What are we remembering? The death, descent, and rising again in power
of our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ. We
remember these fantastic stories because they give us a glimpse, a vision of
God active in this world, of God alive in this world, fully, and somehow,
mysteriously, we remember a vision of the world as it is supposed to be. And this is not imagination; this is
cellular, soul-ular memory. We know how
it is supposed to be, our beings remember it.
We are made of dust that was there at the beginning. That is the mystery. Revel in our immersion in the mystery of this
night, when earth and heaven are joined and we are reconciled to God.
Immersion in mystery, in mystery
enacted in the rites and rituals we practice tonight, rites and rituals that
have been practiced for two thousand years much like this, that alone is a take
away message. It is an Anglican truism
that praying shapes believing, and praying like this, together, by this flame,
in this particular way that comes but once a year, that helps us believe. But believe what? It helps us believe that things aren’t always
what they seem. It helps us believe that God’s ways are not our ways and that
we are the ones that need to do the adjusting. It helps us realize that those
adjustments that are needed are hard; for God does expect the
impossible, God does demand what we can’t even begin to comprehend, God does
require sacrifice and forgiveness, loving-kindness and humility solely on the
basis of faith. Faith that there is
a way things are supposed to be, faith that the Kingdom of God is at hand and
faith that in faith we can make real the Kingdom of God on earth, faith that in
faith we can make it real in our life times, faith that in faith we can make it
real in this very moment. Great is the
mystery of faith.
Why is this mystery so critical? Why is a cosmic humility that we don’t
understand it all, that we can’t, why is that such an essential aspect of our
approach to understanding ourselves and our relationships with God, our
neighbors and everything? Why is a bow
to the unknowable the key to knowing anything?
Mostly, it is because it is the nature
of reality. We all float in a great sea
of unknowing. Our memories are fatefully
flawed; any historian or expert on witnesses at trials will attest to
that. Our perception of what is
happening right now is inconsistent at best:
someone right now is having a deep religious experience, someone else is
learning something about themselves or maybe even God. Someone else is bored, annoyed by my droning
on, someone else is thinking about how cute Amelia is or the basketball game
that she is missing or his high school boyfriend. We have so few things in our collective
existences that ground us, that anchor us to some modicum of common shared
experience, we share so few reference points to connect us to the true nature
of things. Great is the mystery.
The mystery of faith posits that even
though we are all adrift in the fog, that even as mired as we all are in
darkness, there is a way. There is an
eternal reference, a known point in existence that intersects with our realm,
the realm of time and space. That point,
that reference point is Our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ. He is the light that shines in the darkness
and the darkness does not overcome it.
Jesus Christ transcended life and death in the mystery of the Passion
and Resurrection as He transcends the probable and possible in His eternal and
actual presence in the hearts, minds and bodies of the faithful, and in His
eternal and actual presence in the church and in her sacramental being. How?
Why? I am afraid that these are
unanswerable questions to the point of being unaskable.
We are drawn to God in the light of
Christ because we carry that light within.
We are not separate from God, we are not estranged from God, not really,
it just seems that way. If we had the
eyes to see it, the ears to hear it, the tongue to taste it, the memory deep
enough to hold it, we would see that the distance between us and God is a
figment, a very massive and convincing figment, but a figment of our
imagination. That is the nature of sin: distortion and distraction. This is the atonement, the reconciliation of
us and God that Jesus Christ offers.
Jesus removes that distance, closes that gap and reminds us of how it is
supposed to be. What do we need to
remember? That it is in God that we live
and move and have our being. That it is
in Christ, the Morning Star that all of creation is enlightened. That it is the Holy Spirit that moves across
the abyss and fills our lungs with life.
Tonight we remember welcoming the light of Christ into
the world with the words of the Exsultet.
“How blessed is this night, when earth and heaven are joined and man is
reconciled to God.” And when we rest into this deep mystery, this cloud of
unknowing how and why it is the way it is, we have the chance to remember that
there is nothing, nothing, nothing to worry about. It all just is. This is the Good News of Jesus Christ our
Lord and Savior with whom we commune this night. Great is the mystery of faith. Hallelujah!
Let me end with this poem by Lynn Unger that Bryn up in
the choir shared with me.
They thought they were safe
that spring night; when they daubed
the doorways with sacrificial blood.
To be sure, the angel of death
passed them over, but for what?
Forty years in the desert
without a home, without a bed,
following new laws to an unknown land.
Easier to have died in Egypt
or stayed there a slave, pretending
there was safety in the old familiar.
But the promise, from those first
naked days outside the garden,
is that there is no safety,
only the terrible blessing
of the journey. You were born
through a doorway marked in blood.
We are, all of us, passed over,
brushed in the night by terrible wings.
Ask that fierce presence,
whose imagination you hold.
God did not promise that we shall live,
but that we might, at last, glimpse the stars,
brilliant
in the desert sky.
Great is the Mystery of
Faith. Christ is Risen! Happy
Easter. AMEN
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